Review: 'Argylle' - Just ... No. | Kurt Loder | Columns

The awfulness of "Argylle" is so nearly complete that one regrets even having to mention the movie's release. This isn't the fault of the actors; they're fine. It's everything else in the madcap mix -- the garbled direction by onetime action ace Matthew Vaughn, the way-too-clever script by Jason Fuchs, the flavorless score by Lorne Balfe and whoever picked most of the disco-y needle drops. None of this stuff works.

The story -- a neo-Bond spy spoof -- practically guarantees viewer bewilderment. It concerns Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), the mild-mannered author of a popular series of globe-trotting spy novels featuring the dashing Agent Argylle (Henry Cavill, an actor once in the running to play James Bond before Daniel Craig was hired). Elly has just finished her fifth Argylle opus when she encounters a real spy named Aidan (Sam Rockwell) on a train. Aidan tells Elly she's in danger: her books have somehow been accurately predicting the machinations of an international criminal organization called The Division, the head of which -- a grim-lipped villain called Ritter (Bryan Cranston) -- wants Elly snuffed before she can reveal any more of the group's felonious secrets.

Before we go any further here (and since the movie's a mind-numbing two hours and 19 minutes long, there's a lot of further to go), let us wonder together why the handsome Henry Cavill has been lumbered with a ridiculous flattop haircut and odd green-velvet blazers. And why the wonderful Richard Grant passes through the proceedings at one point for (checking stopwatch) almost a moment. Most maddening is Vaughn's decision to portray the interrelationships between the characters in Elly's books and the ones we see in her real-life adventure by having some of them start speaking lines which are then finished, in a different closeup, by their counterparts. This is fantastically annoying.

More enjoyable, unsurprisingly, is Sam Rockwell, who juices the whole movie as much as he can (he's only human, though) and gets off a few trademark dance moves, too. Also fun is the great Catherine O'Hara, who plays Elly's mom. But confusion sets in once again when we find ourselves in an out-of-nowhere interlude set in a French vineyard, strolling among the grape rows with Samuel L. Jackson, who for some reason is dropping knowledge about pinot noir.

The movie's technical shortcomings don't ameliorate any of this. Although the picture's budget is said to have been $200 million, the lighting is flat and the rampant CGI startlingly primitive. (The silly bouncing cat is essentially a cartoon.)

More fundamentally problematic is the casting of Bryce Dallas Howard. She's always an appealing presence, but she's also a little bland, and despite the fact that her character is supposed to be a little bland, too, a lack of pizzazz is the opposite of what's needed in a movie like this. Howard also has the misfortune to be made to carry the movie's most hootingly preposterous sequence, a riot of smoke-choked absurdity that seems scant reward for having made it through to the end of this mercilessly wacked-out picture.

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Kurt Loder is the film critic for Reason Online. To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.